Archive for the ‘Life Balance’ Category

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Eliminate Your Emotional Reactions

Monday, August 30th, 2010
Feeling a little frustrated?

Feeling a little frustrated?

How much EASIER would your life be if you did not have to constantly manage your emotional reactions?  Imagine having a positive impact on your relationships with others, without expending as much energy to do so. It is finally possible to resolve the emotional energy that causes emotional reactions.

What are Management Strategies?

Management strategies use your ability to think.   Almost all personal development, coaching and counselling are based on exploring and changing your thinking.  In the coaching and personal development work I’m most familiar with, our conversations explore the following areas:

  • Taking 100% responsibility for everything that happens in your life and not being a victim or blaming others.
  • Habits – choosing things to positively serve your body and your life rather than doing things which suppress emotions and have negative impacts; such as too much sugar, alcohol, smoking, lack of sleep, too many hours in front of a TV or computer, to mention a few.
  • Attitudes – recognizing whether you experience things from a positive perspective or negative perspective.  Is the glass half full or half empty?
  • Beliefs – challenging what you believe to be true about the way the world works.
  • Control – attempting to redirect your emotional reactions; stopping yourself from being upset and having a negative impact.

Managing all of these areas takes focus and energy, and over time you will change some of your habits, attitudes and beliefs. This allows you to live a happier life, because you are more resourceful in the moment,  able to control your emotional reactions and you can take more responsibility for what is happening in your life.  Life will be better.  With practice and continuous work it certainly was for me.

And there is something even easier: resolving energy.

What is RESOLVING?

Resolving virtually eliminates the need to constantly be managing and controlling your emotions.  What you were previously managing becomes easy, and upsetting emotional reactions virtually disappear over time.  You get to experience more bliss in life.

Resolving the energy that causes emotional reactions is like draining old sludge out of your battery to make room for more vibrant energy to fuel your life.   It is the old sludge energy from past emotional conditioning that causes you to have emotional reactions such as frustration, anger, anxiety, worry and fear.  By resolving you are eliminating energy from your body rather than adding new thinking or learning.  It is like deleting a virus from your personal human hard drive.

I was recently doing this work with a friend of mine and his relatively new big flat panel TV stopped working one day.  His normal reaction would have been to get angry and upset.  Instead he very calmly dealt with the situation, finding someone to help him take the TV in to be serviced on warranty.  He didn’t have to expend any energy on being angry or on trying to control an emotional reaction.  He just took care of business.

When is it good to Manage?

Being able to manage your emotions is very useful in the moment when situations occur that push your emotional hot buttons (associated with unresolved underlying energy).  When you are resourceful in the moment your actions will have a positive impact on the people around you.  Having a positive impact is always a good thing in my books!

Then at a later point in time you can sit down and resolve the energy.

How do you Resolve the old energy?

We will show you how in the Emotional Hot Button Removal workshop.  Click Here for more information

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Feedback Helps Growth

Thursday, August 26th, 2010
The Truck has a new paint job!

The Truck has a new paint job!

To keep growing it takes courage to seek feedback and hear the truth from people that are close to us.  A new friend, Gary has been giving me feedback about how I am being.  I must admit that for the most part I did not understand what he was trying to tell me and I also had a lot of resistance to the message that I was hearing.   After all, I had already done a significant amount of personal development work and I really like the person that I have become.  Especially when I compare myself now to whom I use to be.

One of the things that I really appreciate about myself is that I am a committed and avid learner.  So although I had resistance to the message that I was hearing from Gary, I started to check out this messages with other people that are close to me.  Two things happened.   There were those people who love me for exactly who I am and the way that I am today.  These people questioned me about my desire and motivation to change.  Their basic position was that we are fundamentally who we are and that I am just fine the way I am.  I am just fine the way I am and sometimes the people who love us may not be helping us to grow.

I continued to seek more feedback. Due all the emotional energy that I had resolved over the last two years my intuition told me that Gary might have a point and something else might be possible.  One of my friends, Jim, indicated to me that we enter into intimate relationship with people to learn a lesson or resolve something in our life from the past.  Gary was clearly trying to illuminate something in me that was a blind spot.  The problem with a blind spot is that it is very tough to see it and have a clear picture of what could be resolved.  I explored the issue with another friend of mine, Peter, and he told me exactly what Gary had been trying to express, only he expressed it with a very visual image.  He gave the feedback to me in a classic way that put all my defences at rest.  He told me what was wonderful about me and then told me where the improvement might be.

Here is what Peter had to say.  “You have all these wonderful gifts that you use to support people through their turmoil and right now you are transporting these gifts around in a beat up pick-up truck.  These gifts that you have are so wonderful that they deserve to be transported in a brand new Chevy Silverado 3500HD pickup truck, with leather seats, air conditioning and a fantastic tie down system to hold all your wonderful gifts in place.”  When Peter painted this picture for me, I got exactly what Gary had been trying to tell me.  It wasn’t a matter of me being good enough or not good enough, it was that there is another way for me to be and that is “elegant.”

How do I become elegant?  No idea, but I am clear that it is possible and I know that the first step in accomplishing anything is to have a clear intent. And now I have that!

I am grateful to all my friends who provided feedback for me to explore this issue in greater depth.  It is awareness that allows us to continue growing.

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Feeling Connected to Others

Monday, April 19th, 2010
White Rock Beach

White Rock Beach

Last  Friday I was musing about a post that I read on face book about back stabbing.  It occurred to me that one of the reasons we don’t stop ourselves from back stabbing or even talking about others is that we feel like we are separate from others. Like I am me and they are them and we are not one and the same.  Yet I know this is not true, we are all connected.

I have been know to come up with spontaneous ideas in the past that I take action on, which cause me to stretch and grow.  Like setting a goal of hugging a 1001 people and then doing it. You can read about it here,  http://ow.ly/1zvvW Well Friday morning called for just such an idea.  I had just finished drafting the introduction and chapter 1 of my book, two emotionally traumatic pieces of writing for me that have pushed my emotional hot buttons.  I had been working through the emotions all week and was feeling a little alone.  A new idea came to me, what about if I said “Good Morning” to as many people as possible on my run today.

I started to run keeping my head up, rather than looking at the ground, and I focused my attention on the next person, or couple, that was approaching me and in a clear voice I said “good morning”.  Now the benefit for me of doing this is that it was like a meditation, I had a pretty quiet mind throughout the whole process.  I am not a very accomplished runner and my mind could only handle 3 things at once — putting my focus on the up coming person, keeping count and breathing.   I have found breathing to be a necessary part of running!

About a third of the way through the run I had accumulated 20 “good mornings”, so I set a goal of 60.  That would be at least 60 people that I connected with, even for just a fraction of a second. How would people respond?  Some people’s face lit up when they made eye contact with me and heard the warm “good morning”.  Some people broke their conversation for a moment, responded, and then went right back to where they were.  Others interrupted their cell phone call to respond.  And a very few kept looking at the ground and did not respond at all.

How rude you say?  No, the story that I wrote in my mind, it was for these people that I reached out to make contact.  For what ever reason they are not comfortable with contact and they keep themselves separate.  I think it is this sense of separateness that helps to keep us from feeling loved, that causes us to have negative thoughts about others and to speak about others in a negative way.  I think this is where back stabbing really comes from.  It comes from a place of insecurity and lacking love.

By reaching out with our eyes, our hearts and kind words we can touch people even if it is just for a moment.  We can have empathy.

And in the process we might meet a new friend who also likes to touch people.  There were no more people on the boardwalk at the end of my run.  I had 98 “good mornings”. My ego wanted a 100.  So I walked back and called over to Ruth who was walking on the grass, “excuse me I just wanted to say good morning.”  She asked what was I up to and I told her.  I still needed one more person to make my stretch goal.  She said, I have been watching  that person down on the log , he looks like someone who needs a “good morning”.  So I walked down to the beach and said “good morning” and wished him a good day.

Happiness and joy filled my heart as I walked to the parking lot to get into my car.

Who can you connect with and touch today?  Who can you have empathy for when they speak negatively about someone?  And maybe by not repeating the story and giving it energy, it will quietly disappear.

Jacque

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Winning the Game of Work and Life

Thursday, March 11th, 2010

In a blog this morning  I read the famous Michael Gerber quote, “don’t work in your business, work on your business.”  What if  your business was a game?   How would that change how you related to the whole concept of working in your business?   How about your life, could you play it like a game?

  • What would your game be called?
  • What would your game board or playing field be like?
  • Who would be playing the game with you?
  • What would the rules be?
  • How would you define winning?

Exciting.  I love playing games.

This weekend I did just that, played the game of defining my Personal Life Game.  I went to California to play The Game Of ….  – Playing the Game You are Build 4  — See web site http://bit.ly/9yMFUY

The process was fun and creative and totally felt like playing.   I came out of the weekend with a  game plan for all of the above questions and more.  So how do I use the information that I have uncovered?

I am using it to clearly define how I want to show up in this world, who do I want to be and how do I want to experience the world.  It gives more clarity on the Intention that I had set for myself last year  – see article on setting intentions -http://bit.ly/c0jBzw .

I have already used the insights that I have gained in making decisions.  I am in the process of looking for accommodations to rent in Belize for this fall when I take my business fully virtual for 3 months.  It became evident that the accommodations that I was looking at renting would have suited me perfectly from a logistical point of view. In the past this would have signaled me to say “yes”.   However my intuition signaled to me that the tone of the living environment would have been the opposite of the fun, vibrant life that I want to live.  Just by playing my game, I would have pushed my land lady’s fear buttons, causing an emotional reaction leading to conflict.

This was not the kind of experience that I defined for winning the game of my Personal Life. I listened to my intuition and said” no” and I am continuing on my search.

In your business when are you making decisions about what you need to do because it seems to make good logical sense?  Yet  it  creates an experience that you would prefer not to be having.   This is typically what happens when we work in our business rather than working on it.   We are creating experiences for ourselves that do not leave us winning.

This fall I will bring The Game Of…  to Vancouver.   Check the web site above for other games being played in the United States.

May you win and master your own game.

Jacque

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Why changes you want to make don’t last.

Wednesday, January 20th, 2010

Congratulations to those of you who have actually started to make the changes you’ve intended for 2010.  You are part way there!  You may already be feeling the pressure to slip back to old habits.  If you haven’t started yet , maybe it’s because you want to be really sure you’re going to stick to your intentions.  Or, knowing how hard it is to change you decided not to change anything.  Making changes successfully has to do with taking charge of your emotions.

 According to Chip and Dan Heath, in their Jan. 3 article in Parade magazine “Make Changes That Last” the reason it is so hard is because the two independent systems of our brain are not in agreement.  “The emotional side is instinctive, the part that feels pain and pleasure and the rationale side is analytical, the part that deliberates and plans.”  They draw on psychologist Jonathan Haidt’s analogy, “of the Elephant (the emotional side) and the Rider (the rationale side). 

Perched atop the Elephant, the Rider holds the reins and seems to be in charge. But because he is small he’ll lose to the elephant whenever they are in conflict. You experience this whenever you act against your better judgment and hit the alarm clock snooze button, have one drink to many, or procrastinate.  The Elephant likes instant gratification and most changes require making short-term sacrifices for long-term pay-off.”  Chip and Dan go on to identify some very helpful and effective tactics to get the Elephant and Rider going in the same direction, such as giving yourself crystal clear directions, keeping yourself motivated with micro-milestones, and making your environment support your change.

 Read the article at:

http://www.parade.com/health/2010/01/03-make-changes-that-last.html

 What they don’t talk about is what to do when we habitually feel intense overwhelm, anger, frustration and anxiety. These emotions can really get in the way of making the changes we want.  Feeling this way for a prolonged period or when it’s inappropriate to the situation is often caused from unresolved or unprocessed emotion. We like to refer to it as having our buttons pushed. Step by step behavioral change strategies don’t work so well with this, and it takes a really long time.

 A better option is to make transformational change, whereby unwanted emotional habits and conditioning are resolved to the point where your buttons no longer get pushed.  Our awareness shifts to an expanded state of consciousness from which we are attuned to both the elephant and the rider and can make new choices beyond habituated patterns and triggered reactions.  

Once you know how to resolve triggered emotions and access this expanded state of awareness you’ll experience a different relationship with the emotional and rational parts of your brain.  Your emotions won’t run away on you, and you won’t be ‘driven’ by the need to over-analyze, judge and control.  Making lasting changes becomes much, much easier.

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